For an August 2004 deletion debate over Rambot's articles see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/User:Rambot.

See also User talk:Rambot/Random page

• La Crosse, Florida - population 140 people. Obviously created by Rambot, this page currently contains no useful information about the town. It is simply a collection of information from the 2000 census. According to Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, Wikipedia articles are not "Mere collections of public domain or other source material". This article is a mere collection of the US census information. No links to this page, except the county page. I belive the demographics information to be useful, however, without some history, and intelligent writing to go along with it, it is quite useless. dave 17:32, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
  • 140 people? I can beat that.
  • If this page is deleted, one might as well delete almost all of the other 30,000 town and city pages created by Rambot. This makes no sense. -- RTC 17:41, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
  • I know this has been debated before. I'll look for that debate now. But note that since the Rambot articles are still here, no consensus to delete was reached before. (I personally am easy either way.) -- Cyan 18:05, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • Don't delete. My town was the first thing I edited here and one of the things that led me here from Google. The census information provides a good template.198.160.96.7 18:25, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
  • Leave it and other such Rambot contributions. They are usefull starter articles. Hundreds have been expanded into informative articles, and more are every week. -- Infrogmation 18:37, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • Don't delete. My experience was the same. First thing I worked on when I arrived at Wikipedia was my hometown "stub". Also had another experience worth considering: an entry of stats was all that was present for a "town" near mine, but no such town existed by the name given. From the skewed stats (no old people, large male to female ratio) I was able to determine that the place was a nearby military base. I renamed the article to the correcty place. - Marshman 19:03, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
      • These may be good reasons related to your personal experience, however, this does nothing to justify the existence of the article in question above. Stubs should not be left in just so that some dude from that town can have something to do with his spare time when and if he ever finds that article. Besides the demographic information provided by Rambot is totally boring and it even gives 0.00% values all over the place. I edited London, Ontario a while back when it was still a small article, and I added a useful demographic section based on language spoken. Also for my home town Richmond, British Columbia, I added a few interesting tidbits of demographics. Much more concise and "pretty" than Rambot's info. dave 20:32, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
        • To my knowledge there is no consensus that stubs should be deleted on sight. In fact, the consensus tends more to improving upon them. --Morven 20:56, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
        • Personal experience is all we have! So far we have two users who say that the hometown article was an important reason they looked at Wikipedia, a good reason to keep it since it appears on search engines and directs more users here. Whether or not the information is "boring" in your personal experience is as relevant as others personal experiences. There is much I find boring on Wikipedia, but not all people share my opinion. If someone is looking up an encyclopedia article for a high school term paper on the racial makeup of a town or city then the article will be "useful" even if "boring".Ark30inf 00:40, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I've lost count of the number of times I've used these articles to find out information on American towns - where they are, how big they are, and so on. I've found uses for the articles. Therefore they're not useless. Q.E.D. :) -- Oliver P. 01:05, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Keep them. There is absolutely no justification for removing them. RickK 01:16, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

For very small/insignificant places, there may be justification for merging/redirecting. See, for example, Crystal Lake, Broward County, Florida. Martin 11:48, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

• The reasoning behind wanting to delete this Crystal Lake was that it is not a town at all, it is just a lake. First, what can possibly be written about this lake next to a golf course that is encyclopedic? Second, according to the Rambot data, it is supposed to be a town that contains no area. How is this possible? By definition, a town must contain some land area; it must be a "locality." Therefore, in this case, the census data is wrong. (Is it news to anyone that the US Census data can be unreliable?) Why would we keep incorrect information? If there is no town, then there should not be an article, right? Paige 15:41, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Hoo-ahem. Never mind. But, articles on small towns cannot all be painted with a single stroke. Many a place-name there is that has History with it, that is Important in some way that belies its small size or population. Others even of some substantial size are really of no encyclopedic interest. Witnessith: Nitro, West Virginia, which has a colorful history beginning with the production of ammunition during World War I and culminating in several Superfund-funded cleanups of the ensuing mess. Worthy of an article by any standards. In contrast, there are places like Sun Lakes, Arizona that despite their size and populicity are such cookie-cutter replicas of the suburban American sun-belt archetype that they aren't worthy of a single word.

UninvitedCompany 16:57, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

You should write the history of Nitro, West Virginia in the article. It would be a useful addition. RickK 00:38, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

You wrote But, articles on small towns cannot all be painted with a single stroke... and everyone agrees with you. Think of Rambot's articles as a first solid 'wash' of the paper (I think wash is the right artist's term) opon which rich articles can be stroked. Pete 16:33, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Don't delete.

Just imagine every country in the world having a Rambot style compilation of their towns/townships, all clamouring for entry into Wikipedia, a general encyclopedia after all! Those vast numbers of names, in China, India, Russia only to mention some, what would we be talking about? 500,000? I think don't include unless there is something to say about them, a special reason to include them. In fact, townships should be deleted Dieter Simon 23:23, 22 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I think every town township and village in the world should be here. RickK 23:37, 22 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Ah, but can poor Wiki cope with it without extra servers, etc.? Please convince all of us, it is important, the system is already pretty slow as it is. I still thing there should be special reasons and features of interest for all readers to qualify for inclusion. Dieter Simon

This has nothing to do with servers, it has to do with disk space, and as Jimbo Wales continues to remind us, we have plenty of disk space. To limit the inclusion of certain places in the world is POV. RickK 00:13, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Indeed. Even if had a 10 kbyte article on each of the approximately 4,000,000 NIMA-listed villages, geographic features, or larger places in the world, we would consume only 40 Gbytes of disk space. Which is rather less than the cheapest hard drive you can buy. We can expect to have multiple terabytes of disk storage soon. -- Karada 00:25, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Thank you, RickK and Karada, for your explanations.:) --Dieter Simon

There's no need to delete them, just put ((Rambot-cruft)) at the top, which will put

((Rambot-cruft))

there, then some one who has a lot of spare time on their hands can expand them. BTW, is there a way to make a bot that will put ((Rambot-cruft)) at the top of all of them? Supersaiyanplough|^(talk) 10:19, 11 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]